Bloggers as Early Adopters of Public Opinion: Ethnography of Influencing Networked Publics

For half a century communication researchers have been putting to the test theories of mass media effects on public opinion. However, the blogosphere‘s ability to influence public opinion is not yet backed by consistent empirical evidence or an account of the relevant practices.

Similar to the situation in Austria, Israeli political blogging is ignored by national commercial mass media. As a result, case studies from the Israeli blogosphere provide us with a rare opportunity to isolate the resulted influence of blogging efforts and learn about the ways that blogging shapes public opinion. The research presented in the talk is based on an ongoing ethnography of the Israeli blogosphere conducted as a participant observer since 2004, observing the formation of the Israeli „A-list“ political blogs as a discourse that emerged from scattered personal journals, and tracing the activities during two election campaigns (municipal and national).

Carmel Vaisman is a communications scholar and freelance journalist based in Israel with a research focus on Internet culture and digital folklore. She explored issues of identity and agency in her PhD thesis entitled „Israeli girls and digital subcultures: language, gender and playfulness on blogs“. Institutionally, Carmel Vaisman is affiliated to the Department of Communication at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

14. Februar 2008

I recently asked Jurgen Habermas in a public forum what his current opinion is about the state of the public sphere, now that the broadcast era has been supplanted by the many-to-many media that enable so many people to use the Internet as a means of political expression. He blew off the question without explanation, and a little further investigation into the very sparse pronouncements he has made in this regard has led me to understand that he simply does not understand the Internet. His ideas about the relationship between public opinion and democracy and the role of communication media, and the commodification and manipulation of political opinion via public relations, are still vitally important. But I think it’s important now to build new theories and not simply to rely on Habermas, who is signalling his ignorance of the meaning of the changes in the infosphere that have taken place in recent decades. He did his part in his time, but the ideal public sphere he described — a bourgeois public sphere dominated by broadcast media — should not be taken as the model for the formation of public opinion in 21st century democracies. Some background on my interest in this subject and Habermas’ personal opinion follows. And then I’ll briefly describe my recent encounter with the man himself.